Islam is the religion of about 90 per cent of Egyptians, almost all of them Sunni Muslims, and it is the official religion of the state under Egypt's constitution. Most of the remaining 10 per cent or so are Christians, overwhelmingly members of the Coptic Orthodox Church, one of the oldest churches in the world. With a population of around 110 million, Egypt has the largest Christian community in the Middle East and North Africa and the largest Muslim population of any Arab country. The country's religious landscape is layered like its history: pharaonic temples, early Christian monasteries and some of Islam's most important mosques and universities stand within a few hours of one another along the Nile.
How Many Christians? A Disputed Number
The exact size of Egypt's Christian population is one of the most argued-over statistics in the region. Egypt's census has not published a breakdown by religion since 1986, when it recorded about 6 per cent Christians. Government figures and the Pew Research Center have tended to put the figure around 5 per cent, while the Coptic Orthodox Church has claimed 15 to 20 per cent. Most independent estimates fall between about 5 and 15 per cent, which in a country of Egypt's size means somewhere between 5 and 15 million people. The number matters because it bears on how much political weight Christians can claim.
Almost all of Egypt's Muslims are Sunni. There are very small numbers of Shia Muslims, perhaps tens of thousands, as well as members of the Baháʼí faith, which the state does not recognise. The constitution recognises only three "heavenly" religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism.
Karnak and Amarna: The Religion of the Pharaohs
For about three thousand years before Christianity, Egyptians worshipped a large family of gods, including Ra the sun god, Osiris the lord of the dead, his wife Isis, and Amun of Thebes. The temple complex of Karnak, at modern Luxor, built and extended over some two thousand years, was dedicated to Amun and is one of the largest religious sites ever constructed. The pyramids at Giza, built around 2600 to 2500 BCE, were royal tombs at the heart of a religion focused on the afterlife, described in our guide to the pyramids of Giza.
Around 1350 BCE the pharaoh Akhenaten broke with that tradition. He promoted the worship of a single god, the Aten, the disc of the sun, above all others, and moved his capital to a new city at Amarna, halfway between Memphis and Thebes. His religious revolution did not outlast him, and his successors, including Tutankhamun, restored the old gods. The last pagan temple still in use, the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae near Aswan, was closed on the orders of the Byzantine emperor Justinian around 537 CE. The last known inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphs were carved there too, in 394.
Alexandria and the Desert: A Christian Egypt
According to Coptic tradition, Christianity was brought to Egypt by Saint Mark the Evangelist, who founded the church of Alexandria in the first century. Alexandria became one of the great intellectual centres of early Christianity, and by the fourth and fifth centuries most Egyptians were Christian. The word Copt comes, through Arabic, from the Greek word for Egyptian, Aigyptios, and the Coptic language, the last stage of ancient Egyptian written in a Greek-based alphabet, survives today in the church's liturgy.
Egypt's deserts gave Christianity one of its most important institutions: monasticism. Saint Anthony, born around 251, withdrew into the desert to live alone as a hermit, and his example drew followers. Around 320 Pachomius founded the first communal monasteries, where monks lived and worked together under a rule. The Monastery of Saint Anthony, near the Red Sea, has been occupied almost continuously since the fourth century. At the foot of Mount Sinai, Saint Catherine's Monastery, built on the orders of Justinian between about 548 and 565, is one of the oldest working Christian monasteries in the world and holds one of the oldest libraries still in use.
In 451 the Council of Chalcedon adopted a statement on the nature of Christ that the church of Alexandria rejected. The split set the Coptic Church on its own path, in communion with the Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian churches. The Ethiopian Church was led by bishops appointed from Alexandria until 1959, a link explored in our article on religion in Ethiopia.
Fustat and Al-Azhar: The Coming of Islam
Arab Muslim armies led by Amr ibn al-As conquered Egypt between 639 and 642 and founded a new garrison town, Fustat, now part of Cairo, where the Mosque of Amr ibn al-As still stands, rebuilt many times, as one of the oldest mosque sites in Africa. Egypt did not become majority Muslim overnight. Conversion was gradual, encouraged by a tax on non-Muslims and by intermarriage, and historians think Muslims may not have become a majority until around the tenth century or later. Arabic slowly replaced Coptic as the spoken language.
In 969 the Fatimids, a Shia dynasty, conquered Egypt and founded Cairo, and in 970 they began building the mosque of al-Azhar. It became one of the oldest continuously operating universities in the world, and after Saladin restored Sunni rule in 1171, it became the leading centre of Sunni learning. Its Grand Imam is still one of the most influential figures in Sunni Islam. Medieval Cairo, with its hundreds of mosques, madrasas and minarets, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the city is often called "the city of a thousand minarets". Sufi orders remain widespread, and huge crowds gather for the mawlid festivals of saints, such as that of Sayyida Zaynab in Cairo and Sayyid al-Badawi in Tanta.
Modern Egypt: Between Faith and State
Egypt's constitution names Islam as the state religion and the principles of Islamic law, sharia, as the main source of legislation, while also guaranteeing freedom of belief. Personal matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance are governed by each community's religious law. Every Egyptian's national identity card records their religion, and changing it from Islam to another faith is in practice almost impossible.
Political Islam has been a powerful force. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Hassan al-Banna in Ismailia in 1928, and after the revolution of 2011 its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won Egypt's first free presidential election in 2012. He was removed by the army in 2013, led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, now president, and the Brotherhood was banned as a terrorist organisation.
Everyday religious life is visible everywhere. The call to prayer sounds five times a day from tens of thousands of mosques, and during Ramadan streets are hung with colourful lanterns called fawanees, a custom Egyptians trace back to the Fatimid era, while long tables are set out on pavements so that passers-by can break the fast for free at sunset. Christians fast too: the Coptic calendar has more than 200 days of fasting a year for the most observant, when they avoid meat and dairy.
The Copts Today
Copts live throughout Egypt but are concentrated in Cairo, Alexandria and in Upper Egypt, particularly in provinces such as Minya and Asyut. Since 2012 the church has been led by Pope Tawadros II, the 118th Pope of Alexandria in a line that the church traces back to Saint Mark. Many Copts are recognisable by a small cross tattooed on the inside of the right wrist, a tradition that dates back centuries. The church also has millions of members abroad, especially in the United States, Canada and Australia.
Copts have faced discrimination and violence. Until 2016, building or repairing a church required a special permit that was often delayed for years. A law passed that year eased the rules, and thousands of unlicensed churches have since been legalised. Attacks by Islamist militants have been deadly. A suicide bombing at a church in Alexandria on New Year's Day 2011 killed 23 people. In February 2015 the Islamic State group in Libya beheaded 21 Christian workers, 20 of them Egyptian Copts, and the church has since recognised them as martyrs. On Palm Sunday in April 2017, bombings at churches in Tanta and Alexandria killed at least 45 people. In 2019 President Sisi opened the Cathedral of the Nativity in the New Administrative Capital, one of the largest churches in the Middle East, beside an equally monumental mosque.
The Vanished Jewish Community
Egypt once had a large and old Jewish community. Moses Maimonides, the greatest medieval Jewish philosopher, lived and worked in Fustat in the twelfth century, and in the Ben Ezra synagogue there, scholars in the late nineteenth century found the Cairo Geniza, a store of some 300,000 manuscript fragments that has transformed understanding of medieval Mediterranean life. In the 1940s about 75,000 to 80,000 Jews lived in Egypt. Following the creation of Israel in 1948 and the Suez crisis of 1956, when many were expelled, almost all left. Only a handful of elderly people remain. In 2020 Egypt completed the restoration of the Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue in Alexandria, one of the largest in the Middle East.
The Nile has tied all these communities to the same narrow strip of fertile land for thousands of years. How the river shaped the country's settlement is explained in our guide to the Nile, Africa's gift.